Heretofore, poultry wings, particularly those of chickens, have been cut into sections for the retail trade such as to the fast food and restaurant industries. The cutting has been done manually by severing the wings at the elbow joint where the drumette and middle sections are joined and by severing the wing where the middle section and flipper are joined. This manual process has proven to be expensive due to the high cost of labor and the risk of personal injury.
To overcome problems attendant with the manual cutting of poultry wings, attempts have been made to provide automated wing cutting apparatus. One such apparatus is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,207,653 wherein a rotatable drum-like, wing retaining means is provided with circumferentially spaced axial grooves contoured to receive poultry wings. These axially spaced grooves are intersected by axially spaced annular slots and stationary knife blades are positioned within the slots. The blades are arranged to cut through the wing elbow joints and wing flipper joints of the wings carried in the grooves of the rotating drum. Resilient bands are located within other annular slots of the drum which are located beside those slots in which the knife blades are housed. The resilient bands serve to straddle both the elbow joint and the flipper joint and to bias them into the grooves of the drum so that clean joint cuts may be effected by the knives.
Though the apparatus of the type just described does possess advantages over manual cutting procedures, the prior art devices have been beset with one particular problem, namely that of severing the flipper joint at the proper location. Once the drumette has been severed from the rest of the wing by cutting engagement with a first knife blade, the resilient bands then acting upon the middle section and flipper of the portion of the wing still present in the slot of the rotating drum tends to seat the flipper joint in accordance with the size and shape of the drumette and flipper. Therefore, where a middle section is larger than normal with respect to an attendant flipper, more force is applied to it by the resilient band in contact with it, thereby tending to move the flipper such that the cut in the flipper joint is made not directly into the joint but beside the joint and partially into the drumette. Thus, the accuracy of the flipper joint cut has been dependent upon both the size of the midsections and flippers of individual wings and also, to some extent, upon whether the wing is a right hand wing or a left hand wing. Accordingly, a need remains for a method and apparatus for cutting poultry wings in an automated manner which overcomes the problems and limitations of the methods and apparatus of the prior art. It is the provision of such methods and apparatuses to which the present invention is accordingly directed.